Forbes India 30 Under 30 2025: Digantara, building Google Maps for space

Digantara is working toward achieving surveillance superiority, ensuring not only a safer and more sustainable space environment but also towards safeguarding sovereign assets in the face of an increasingly contested space domain

By Harichandan Arakali Forbes India Staff

Published: Feb 17, 2025 12:39:38 PM IST

Updated: Feb 17, 2025 01:37:40 PM IST

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Anirudh Sharma, Founder and CEO, Digantara Research and Technologies Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India; Directed By: Kapil Kashyap; Background Image: Shutterstock

With the launch of Digantara Research’s SCOT satellite, Founder and CEO Anirudh Sharma and his co-founders have joined an elite club of space tech entrepreneurs who are building space surveillance and intelligence technologies.

Digantara, a Bengaluru startup, announced the launch on January 14. SCOT stands for space camera for object tracking. It was among the 131 satellites onboard SpaceX’s Transporter-12 Falcon-9 rocket that lifted off from the Vandenberg spaceport in the US.

As one of the world’s first commercial ‘space situational awareness’ satellites, SCOT is engineered to track ‘resident space objects’ with high frequency and precision, the company said in a press release. Especially with low-earth orbits becoming commercially very important but also increasingly crowded, SCOT is purpose-built to monitor smaller space objects, deliver higher revisit rates, and provide enhanced tracking accuracy, according to the release.

“With SCOT, we are taking a crucial step in achieving surveillance superiority, ensuring not only a safer and more sustainable space environment but also towards safeguarding sovereign assets in the face of an increasingly contested space domain,” Sharma said in the release.

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“There are over 11,000 active satellites in orbit, and that number will only increase. We need a mechanism to navigate an orbit and understand what’s happening. Think of what we’re building as Google Maps for space,” Sharma tells Forbes India in an interview.

SCOT will be deployed in a sun-synchronous orbit, enabling it to track objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with greater efficiency than existing sensors, which are constrained by weather conditions, geographic limitations, and restricted fields of view, according to Digantara. The satellite offers persistent monitoring, detecting and tracking objects as small as 5 cm across.

This success has been several years in the making. Sharma and his co-founder Rahul Rawat started tinkering with an early idea while in college in Punjab, in 2018. They’d learnt of a satellite club their friend Tanveer Ahmed was running in Bengaluru.

The trio stepped up their efforts from 2020, after graduation, with degrees in engineering, and with incubation and grant support from the Indian Institute of Science.

“Without ISRO, we wouldn’t have a space sector in India. They developed this talent base over decades,” Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV Partners, one of Digantara’s biggest VC backers, points out. “What changed, the big trigger, was the deregulation, and private space industry became possible in India. Today we have some very young space tech founders too.”

“Digantara has a solid shot at building the world’s first space-based system for tracking objects in orbit,” Shailesh Lakhani, a managing director at Peak XV who led the firm’s investment in the startup, had said in a blogpost at the time in June 2023.

That’s beginning to come true.

Anirudh Sharma (26)

Founder and CEO, Digantara Research and Technologies

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